The third season of the Old School is Best School contest gets underway today. In case you’re new to the contest, it’s basically a contest series created specifically for overclockers that enjoy benching on very old, classic hardware. To the old timers it represents a walk down memory lane, but for more youthful members of the community it is also a chance to discover and explore hardware from a bygone era.

Round 1 of the OSiBS contest kicks off today and in terms of CPUs, features the long lost Intel Socket 771. In fact you are also allowed to use a modded Socket 775 chip if that’s what you have. In terms of GPU all contestants are limited to using Nvidia’s G96-based Quadro cards. Single GPU configurations only. As well as hardware, the contest also requires knowledge of older benchmarks (and indeed older operating systems). Benchmarks in Round 1 include Maxmen Read Bandwidth in Stage 1, 3DMark06 in Stage 2 and 3DMark Vantage for Stage 3.

Round 1 of the Old School is best School starts today and runs until January 15th. Click here to find a full and detailed write up of all five rounds that we have lined up, including all the hardware limitations, benchmarks and rules setup for each stage of each round.